But since Harriet and our sympathetic friends, the compilers of guidebooks, have been there, much has been done. Hitherto the head only stood above the desert, encroaching around it. Seventy years ago, English enterprise, for once not purely mercenary, enabled Caviglia to uncover the flight of steps leading to it; but the sand ruthlessly buried it again, until Maspero began the work of excavation, continued by Grébaut, his successor at Boolak. At present they have bared the whole front of the body, the small sanctuary between its paws, and the wide flight of steps. The work still goes on, and may eventually confirm the surmise that it stood in the midst of a huge artificial amphitheatre hewn out of solid rock. The paws are red brick, tawdry looking, and of far later date than the head. We might even regret the excavation of them, were it not that without it we could never get the most perfect view, which is obtainable about half way down the steps, and that but for it we should not have been able to read on the stela of Tutmes IV. how the great king lay down to rest one midday in the shadow of the Sphinx (it was then more than 3000 years old), and the sleeping king dreamed in a dream how the venerable image above him. conjured him to clear away the sand in which it was already nearly buried. Then the prince awoke, and in the silence of the desert "made silence in his heart," and vowed to perform the bidding of the god.

It is cruel to spoil such an idyll, the sleeping king and his dream; but there comes, in this iconoclastic age of ours, one Flinders Petrie, most flintstonehearted of antiquaries, who hints, nay, almost avers, that the pious Tutmes actually pilfered, like a nineteenth-century antiquary, a red granite block from the neighbouring temple of Khafra. Dreadful it is to think of, and of the righteous indignation of Erasmus Wilson when he meets the royal pilferer in Elysium!

If you will, you may, after seeing the Sphinx, go to the temple of Chefren, and the tomb, which Colonel Vyse, with true Anglo-Saxon taste, has rendered ridiculous by associating with the name of a worthy British Consul-General, and which (such is the value of tradition) the Pyramid Arabs point out as the grave of Colonel Campbell. But the Doves were impressed, and unwilling to withdraw from the sight of that face, and the imagination of that sleeping king, pirate though he may have been. Nor did it enter into the plans of the Scribbler, who was unwilling to overladen the non-receptive brain of his pupil. So as the sun was setting behind that stupendous image they drove away, wondering, with Dean Stanley, "what it must have been when on its head there was the royal helmet of Egypt; on its chin the royal beard; when the stone pavement by which men approached the Pyramids ran up between its paws; when immedi

56

CHRONOLOGICAL DISCUSSION.

ately under its heart an altar stood from which the smoke went up into the gigantic nostrils of that nose now vanished from the face never to be conceived again."

The long drive through the avenues of acaccia had lasted for a few minutes before the Scribbler, anxious to ascertain the effect his first lesson had produced, ventured to ask the Turtle his impressions.

As became an ex-minister, the reply was Socratic.

"How old did you say that-er-that object was?"

"Roughly, 7000 years."

The Turtle paused and made a mental calculation.

"It cannot," he said, "be more than 5890 years old, for the world was created on Sunday, 25th March, 4004 B.C."

“Mais nous avons changé tous cela," sang the Sketcher airily.

The Turtle looked shocked, and glanced uneasily at his daughters.

"I think, sir," said the Scribbler, anxious to allay a storm, "the date you mention is wanting in confirmation. It is, if I may say so, not official," he added, seeking words which might appeal to his feelings.

"I think," said the man of Blue Books, somewhat mollified, "I think you will find that date attested in Scripture, and you will not, I hope" (glancing at the Doves), "attempt to-er-to traverse that authority."

"I will not," replied the other; "but you will, I am sure, excuse my pointing out that the date rests on no divine authority. Without even questioning the verbal inspiration of Scripture—a point which, I believe, many undoubtedly orthodox men have given up-nay, without even calling in question the still more doubtful point as to the verbal inspiration of the Authorised Version, we are still not compelled to accept the chronology, which rests on the assertionlet us say the investigations-accurate so far as they then could be, of Archbishop Ussher."

Now, the Turtle had never heard of Archbishop Ussher; but it so happened that he had once had a question with his rector in reference to tithes, and in a friendly way had referred the question to an archbishop, in full confidence that his claims of social superiority would be recognised. The archbishop, however, had given the case against him; and, though accepting the decision, and abstaining even from his first idea of voting for the abolition of the Establishment, the Turtle had held a poor opinion of archbishops ever since. He had already begun to realise, from casual conversation, that Egyptian chronology would not fit in with his preconceived ideas; but he had held tightly to the latter, under the conviction that the received chronology was one of the Thirty

Nine Articles of the Church of England. It was, therefore, a secret relief to him to hear that it rested upon no more secure foundation than the opinion of one of that order of the hierarchy, of whose want of judgment he had in his own case had such a conspicuous example.

"I am quite willing to admit," he said, "that the archbishop you speak of may have made a mistake of a few years in his calculation ;" and the Scribbler felt that his point was gained.

"Accept, then," he continued, "that we have been contemplating a monument created 7000 years ago; and, without further inquiry as to what period it required to bring art to that pitch of perfection, let us assume that the Sphinx is the beginning of creation, as it is the beginning of human creation, so far as we have any existing complete vestige of it, and to-morrow we will skip a few thousand years or so, and continue the subject at Boolak, in presence of the wooden man and the founders of the comparatively modern Pyramids."

Boolak-Museum not inappropriately situated-Khafra-The wooden man-Immutability of Egyptian type-Egyptian alternate slave and rebel-Mummies-Sekenen Ra-Aahmes-Seti-Ramses II. and III.-Pinotem-De mortuis-Comparative chronology-Antiquity of Egyptian art-Petrified prayers-Vulgar pyramids— Hymn to Amen Ra-Tale of the Doomed Prince.

THE

HE Boolak Museum is reached by a long drive through quarters where the lowest European class has added some of its ugliness to, and borrowed some of the extra filth from, the native. It is not here, assuredly, that you would expect to find treasures which no capital in Europe can parallel, and the loss of which no Rothschild could replace. And yet, perhaps, the resting-place for these records of past Egypt has not been ill chosen; for it lies on the banks of the ever-mysterious river, keeping touch, as it were, with the life-stream of the people whose history it records. The Pyramids look down on it from the opposite bank; and the nineteenth century, with its military casernes, its busy cargo-boats, and its sugar-stores, crowd it in on every side. It would be easy to find a more costly habitation. The palaces of Ghizeh or Ghezireh might afford more ample room for the relics of 5000 years, now crowded into a few square yards; but as no building that modern art could devise or imitate would ever look aught but shamefaced in comparison with the glorious

THE STATUE OF KHAFRA.

59

contents themselves-as no style could ever be harmonious with the remains of periods reaching from the prehistoric Second Dynasty to the Ptolemies-it is perhaps better that there should be no attempt to render the casket worthy of the jewels, and that we should plunge, as it were, straight from the hideousness of the lower life of to-day into the quiet garden washed by the Nile, where the tomb of Mariette guards the portal to the mysteries of a giant past.

Statue of Khafra.

"Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear."

The Scribbler, in pursuance of his plan, would permit no loitering, but led the way straight to the statue of Khafra. The builder of the Second Pyramid of Ghizeh, whose character would seem to have been handled with unnecessary severity by Herodotus, has a face of benign shrewdness, and, unless phrenology is at fault, possessed a considerable sense of humour. That it is a likeness, and not a mere conventional representation, is evident. Seated in solemn state among his descendants, he looks every inch of his colossal frame a king. Near him stands the perhaps yet more lifelike figure of the wooden man.

"Do you suppose," said the Turtle, reading from his "Murray," "that there is any truth in this story, that the villagers recognise a likeness between this image of some thousand years old and their own municipal magistrate of to-day?"

"Of course it's true," interrupted the enthusiastic Sketcher. "Here you have the statue of a man hidden at Sakkarah some 6000 years ago. His sons have buried him, succeeded to his camels and his honours, and lived on the same spot. There was a man, whom your soldiers came

across in the last war, who had lived his life of some sixty years within thirty miles of the Nile, and had yet never seen it. So lived this man and his descendants

K